Crystal Stone : part one

Crystal Stone grew up in Pottstown, PA and received her Bachelor’s from Allegheny College. After spending two years teaching math in Jackson, MS, she returned to school to get her MFA in Creative Writing and Environment at Iowa State University. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in various international journals including Driftwood Press, New Verse News, Occulum, Anomaly, BONED, Eunoia Review, isacoustics, Tuck Magazine, Writers Resist, Drunk Monkeys, Coldnoon, Poets Reading the News, Jet Fuel Review, Sigma Tau Delta Rectangle, North Central Review, Badlands Review, Green Blotter, and Southword Journal Online. She gave a TEDx talk called “The Transformation Power of Poetry” the first week of April and her first collection of poetry, Knock-Off Monarch, is forthcoming from Dawn Valley Press this autumn. You can find her on Twitter @justlikeastone8 and on instagram @stone.flowering.

Photo credit: Yve Sojka

How did you first engage with poetry?

I first found poetry as a middle school student and continued to study it throughout my undergraduate career. Then, I stopped writing and reading poetry for two years. It was a tumultuous time. I was a middle school algebra teacher in Jackson, MS. My housing situations were never permanent. My support system didn’t exist. And it was there, in my second year of southern living, that I went to the Mississippi Book Festival and met Caroline Randall Williams, author of Lucy Negro, Redux. She sang “Lucy, Lucy, where you been?” and I was found again, even though I’m a white poet and it wasn’t meant for me. I bought her book and read it over and over. I bought other books like that one. Reginald Dwayne Betts, francine j. harris, Terrane Hayes, Danez Smith. I’d spend my Saturday’s at a lake or swamp reading poetry, a brown beer in one hand and pencil in the other, listening to the water, listening to the poets. I had something to say about all of it. I listed to the poet in others and found the poet in myself revived. That actually inspired me to go to graduate school and enroll in the MFA program I’m in now.